A last look at Arctic Tromsö for this time.

Mind your step?

The Arctic Frontiers conference came to an end in Tromsö on Friday with more presentations and q/a sessions on different aspects of scientific research and findings on the region, from deepsea observatories to melting permafrost and the problems of climate change for indigenous peoples, including reindeer-herders in Arctic areas.
The papers are all available online.
Pick up some scientific papers from Arctic Frontiers

Meanwhile there’s been no stop to developments on climate change in the headlines. President Obama is going full speed ahead with his plans to tackle climate change.

The German government has reached an agreement on a (highly controversial)package to make people scrap their old cars, buy new ones, and – ideally, in theory – reduce emissions.
The German government has also given the go ahead for the iron fertilization experiment in the Antarctic we were discussing before I left for Tromso.
Latest on iron
WWF and others are protesting. There have been some alarming measurements of warming in the Antarctic. The new international Renewable Energies Agency has been launched. And WWF has come up with a new study on the economics of combatting climate change.
The Ice Blogger could blog on all day. Instead, I’ll leave you to check out the links and enjoy a couple of pics of the amazing colours of Arctic Norway from the air.

(No emissions from this one for a while)

Professor Jean-Claude Gascard from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, heads the EU’s Damocles project, identifying the challenges from climate change. He gave a very sobering summary of the state of the Arctic sea ice and confirmed there is virtually no chance of reversing the current warming trend. Only several extremely severe winters could do that, and the scientific community is not expecting that.
Scientists tend to be reluctant to come out with anything they can’t prove, and Prof. Gascard summed up the main elements behind this conviction. Sea ice extent, depths, age and drift are key factors, as well as the air temperature and the number of “freezing degree days”.
By 2002 the ice was at a minimum based on some 50 years of observation. In 2005, there was no “replenishment” of older, multi-year ice exiting the Arctic ocean. This, Prof. Gascard describes as a “tipping point”.
The ice thickness has decreased over a wide area from more than 3 metres 20 or 30 years ago to around 1.5 metres. I remember my trip out on the sea ice in Barrow, Alaska, with Dr. Chris Petrich and the Climate Change College “ambassadors”. I can hear Erika Naga reading out the measurement “1 metre 40”, and the Inupiat telling us how it used to be much thicker.
The ice is melted in various ways: through warmer water from the Atlantic and Pacific underneath, heat from storms and increased radiation from above.
2007 of course was the year that really made everybody wake up. When the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Polarstern went out to set up ice platforms, there was no ice in their target area. The Tara, which has been frozen in and drifting with the ice to compare ice drift with the “Fram” expedition has been drifting three times faster than her predecessor. And the sea ice reached its minimum. 2008 saw almost the same negative record.
Sea ice reflects much more heat back into the atmosphere than water, (albedo effect) which is much darker and absorbs it, exacerbating the warming, in what’s called a “feedback loop”. Again, I was reminded of our trip on the Chukchi Sea with Chris Petrich from the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, who is collecting data on this to be put into global models.
And the number of “freezing degree days” has dropped massively in the last few years.
Professor Gascard’s summary of all this is available online on the Arctic Frontiers site.

And if you have the time and the inclination, have a(nother?) listen to the feature on my trip onto the sea ice with the Climate Change College.

Tromsö today (the days are getting lighter):

The four hours (increasing daily) of daylight here are fascinating. The snow and the sky turn so many different shades of blues and pink, it’s tempting to stand outside and watch the show.
Of course Arctic Frontiers continues inside, so a quick photo session in the lunch-break has to suffice.
There are actually 3 different elements of this conference. The first two days were policy,the rest of the week science, with a parallel International Polar Year meeting taking place. People keep saying it would be great to bring the politicians and scientists together even more and have the ministers and commissioners here all week. To some extent, I think that’s true. Then again, the scientists need their own forum to discuss technical stuff. Some of them told me they were getting impatient with the politics, although they know governance is a key issue for the future of the Arctic.
Somehow, I don’t think the fact that we feel governments are too slow to take action to drastically reduce emissions would change much even if the ministers and commissioners could sit through all the science conferences. The information about the speed at which the Arctic is melting has got through to the politicians. The trouble is the changes we will have to make to our lifestyles and the slow rate at which we’ve been developing alternative technologies. The Norwegian ministers here said quite clearly Norway, for instance, will continue to depend on fossil fuels in coming decades and try to reduce emissions using new technologies like carbon capture and storage (still at experimental stage!)
We have to reduce our energy consumption and drastically increase our use of renewables. I’d say there’s a concensus here on that amongst scientists and politicians here.
One young German scientist said to me last night everybody who understands the science and the situation should just take a stand and support the call for a moratorium on any further exploitation of oil and gas in the Arctic. Now that would be a fine thing. But what about commercial interests? Sigh.

For a quick listen to the short audio report from the conference, click here:
Arctic Frontiers on Living Planet

Off to the next presentation at Tromso University.

This is the 3rd of these Arctic Frontiers conferences, and there is a very impressive collection of people attending from all the sectors involved with the Arctic. Politicians, indigenous representatives, scientists, students (the conference venue is after all the world’s northernmost university), business and industry, ngos and research organisations, and even the military. It’s a great opportunity to catch up on the latest issues, research results and policies, projects and make contacts.
Tromso has traditionally been a “gate to the Arctic“ for explorers. Today, it is still one of the most important departure points – and centres of knowledge and expertise on Arctic issues.
At one point I was sitting next to a senior manager from a major technology company, discussing climate change with an activist from an ngo. He said this is an ideal forum for him to make contacts – and to talk to stakeholders in the region and find out about their concerns and requirements. It’s fair to say all points of views are represented.
One of the major themes in today’s presentations and discussions has been the decision-making or governance issue with regard to the Arctic, against the background of climate change – which is no longer being questioned by any sceptics here. The Norwegian Secretary of State from the Foreign Ministry Elisabeth Waalers, who stood in for her Minister who’s gone down with ‘flu, is convinced existing bodies, such as the Arctic Council, are sufficient to govern and regulate the use of natural resources, she says we just have to implement existing regulations better. The EU is taking a strong new interest in the Arctic, and Joe Borg, the Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, put the case for greater involvement and a coordinating role. One argument is the importance of climate change and the Arctic for the planet as a whole.
I had an interesting talk with Per Berthelsen, the Minister for Finance and Foreign Affairs of Greenland Home Rule. He has no objections to the EU having observer status on the Arctic Council, but stresses they and other “outsiders” should listen to the views and concern of the indigenous peoples who are at home in the Arctic.
The USA, as mentioned in a recent entry, came out with a new strategy in the last week of the Bush administration. The US speaker here, Jim Slutz, was in a strange position, speaking on these issues on his last day in office. Russia will probably publish a strategy soon, but the deputy minister of Natural Resources and Ecology here made no secret of his country’s interest in getting at new oil resources.
Of course WWF and Greenpeace are here to remind us all that climate change is more than just a new opportunity to exploit natural resources. They are sceptical about existing mechanisms being enough. Lindsay Keenan from Greenpeace Sweden told me he sometimes had the feeling people haven’t learnt anything from the mistakes of the past, as there is too much talk of further exploitation of positive effects of climate change rather than proposals for action to tackle it. . Greenpeace has floated the idea of a 50-year moratorium on further exploration in the Arctic, given the background of climate change – i.e. the opposite of what industry and other players are planning. Sounds like a great idea to me – but I can’t say I’m optimistic about its chances of being implemented. But as Prof. Oran Young from the Bren School of Environmental Management, Uni of California, reminded us, we all have to do our bit to stop the Arctic discussion sliding into a “big game” for “big politics” and argue for a non-national, eco-system based approach to governance.
I could write a lot more but will leave you with this summary for the moment and open my ears to some more information, while I have the chance.